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this immense landscape, Geeting’s airplane is but a minisculered mote, an all-but-invisible mechanical gnat droning its way through the firmament toward McKinley.
    Ten minutes later the gnat makes a ninety-degree turn onto a tributary of the main Kahiltna called the Southeast Fork and settles into its descent. A crude snow-landing strip, delineated by a series of plastic garbage bags tied to bamboo tomato stakes, materializes in the middle of the glacier ahead amid a maze of gargantuan crevasses. As the plane gets closer, it becomes apparent that the glacier here is far from flat, as it had appeared from a distance; the strip, in fact, lies on a slope steep enough to give a novice skier pause.
    The thin air at this altitude has severely cut into the Cessna’s power, and the plane will be landing uphill into a cul de sac of mile-high granite walls. Hence, Geeting cheerfully allows, “When you land here, there’s no such thing as a go-around. You’ve got to nail your approach perfectly the first time.” To avoid any unpleasant surprises, he scans the surrounding ridges for wisps of blowing snow that might tip off the existence of hazardous wind conditions. Several miles away, up at the head of the main arm of the glacier, he spies a blanket of wispy cotton-like clouds creeping over a 10,300-foot saddle called Kahiltna Pass. “Those are foehn clouds,” he says. “They indicate extremely turbulent downslope winds—rotors we call ’em. You can’t see it, but the air is churning down those slopes like breaking surf. You take an airplane anywhere near those clouds and I guarantee you’ll get the crap kicked out of you.”
    As if on cue, the Cessna is buffeted by a blast of severe turbulence, and the stall-warning shrieks as the airplane bucks wildly up, down, and sideways. Geeting, however, has anticipated the buffeting, and has already increased his airspeed to counter it. Serenely riding out the bumps, he guides the plane on down until the glacier rises to meet the craft’s stubby aluminum skis with an easy kiss. Geeting taxis the Cessna to theuppermost end of the strip, spins the plane around with a burst of power so that it will be pointed downhill for takeoff, then shuts off the engine. “Well, here we are,” he offers, “Kahiltna International Airport.”
    Geeting’s passengers crawl hastily out into the glacial chill, and three other alpinists, their faces purple and peeling from a month on the hill, eagerly climb on board for a lift back to the land of beer, flush toilets, and green growing things. After five minutes at Kahiltna International, Geeting snaps off a crisp Junior Birdman salute to the dazed-looking crew he’s just unloaded, fires up his Cessna one more time, and roars down the strip in a blizzard of prop-driven snow to pick up the next load of climbers, who are already impatiently awaiting his arrival back in Talkeetna.
    From May through late June, the busiest climbing season on McKinley, it is not unusual for the skies over Talkeetna to reverberate with the infernal whine of ski-equipped Cessnas, Helio Couriers, and cloth-winged Super Cubs from five in the morning to well after midnight. If the racket ever cuts short anybody’s beauty rest, however, no complaints are registered, for Alaska without airplanes would be as unthinkable as Iowa without corn.
    â€œAlaskans,” writes Jean Potter in The Flying North , a history of bush pilots, “are the flyingest people under the American flag and probably the flyingest people in the world.… By 1939 the small airlines of the Territory were hauling twenty-three times as many passengers and a thousand times as much freight, per capita, as the airlines of the United States. The federal government and large corporations had little to do with this.” The driving force behind the development of Alaska aviation, Potter points out, was a ragtag assortment of self-reliant,